


The Soil of a Man's Heart

by SkyHighDisco



Series: Grey Novelette [6]
Category: The Grand Tour (TV) RPF, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Angst, Emotional baggage a.k.a 'griefcase', Friendship, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:14:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26461756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyHighDisco/pseuds/SkyHighDisco
Summary: Richard Hammond shares his final days with James May, but something is telling him that life isn't quite done with him yet...
Relationships: Jeremy Clarkson & Richard Hammond & James May, Richard Hammond & James May
Series: Grey Novelette [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1832563
Comments: 8
Kudos: 5





	The Soil of a Man's Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Final chapter of the series.  
> Rated M for graphic scenes later on.
> 
> To Ymas, who reminded me that Richard is always the part of the equation. :)

* * *

When he hits seventy-five, he is diagnosed with Charles Bonnet syndrome.

What a present for the second half of the seventh decade of his life.

James May, head twitching every few words under the gear knob of hyperkinetic tremor and requiring dialysis every two-three days, predictably gives his initial reaction in form of wheezing laughter and a shaky, pointing finger. The weakest of sorts he has managed to achieve under the notion that he barely has any voice left, but the mocking spirit will never leave those deep blue eyes.

How they seem to age quicker and quicker is mind-numbingly terrifying. Perhaps because their age is made to appear all the more impossible by the fact that they are still surrounded by their past whenever their name is being mentioned, and good grief, they are still a fairly frequent topic all across the globe.

Being able to see their twenty, thirty, forty-year-old selves by only a few clicks, Richard thinks, has given them a sort of immortality credential. A futile, almost teenagely-naive pretence, if he had ever been a victim of one.

Richard had only broken free of it when Jeremy fell as the first victim.

“Fourth dimension”, James says, seated on his ottoman. He is blinking profusely and reaching with his mouth for the straw. The strength and reliability of his hands have finally betrayed him to the fullest. Not that James holds anybody at point-blank. The fault is nobody’s but maybe his. Still, it is an impressive, epic life road they had accompanied him on.

Richard is sitting in a lounge chair in the same room. It’s been two days since Jeremy’s funeral. Two days since something has started to noticeably be missing in him. He didn’t know about James, but Richard supposed they needn’t have been on the same continent during their time together to know the other two are out there somewhere. Until now.

This is a final frontier that managed to cleave them apart from Jeremy.

“Not again, James”, Hammond groans despite himself.

“You’ve come to me”, James accuses.

That is true. But only because Richard didn’t know where else to go. Mindy is gone to a hurdler festival with friends. Old ladies’ afternoon out. The girls have long ago moved out. For the first time, his Herefordshire mini-castle appeared too big. He couldn’t stand the sinister silence and gnawing emptiness and after ten minutes of nerve-tearing suspense, grabbed the jacket, the keys and sped off in Oliver (appropriate suit for one old man). He had nowhere in particular in mind, but his subconsciousness has led him exactly where it should with confident assurance.

Richard sips his tea quietly, resisting the urge to rub his eyes, concurringly half-willingly prompting James to continue.

“Time”, James explains on, “is the only thing that defines us, besides light. The prime tool and at the same time biggest mystery of quantum physics.”

“I don’t want to listen to your quantum physics, James”, Richard half-growls. He doesn’t know where this frustration is coming from, but he seems to be getting angrier with each passing hour, day, not knowing what to epitomize his anger on. Which only angers him even more.

James blinks. Those are spasmodic, squeezing, rapid blinks, consequently followed by contemptible head twitches. “Well… what _do_ you want to listen to, then?”

Richard looks up. James’ eyes are impossibly juvenile. They are big, sad, polite. Old. The you-don’t-have-to look. The it’s-all-right look.

Like Jeremy’s when he would feign sympathy and guilt.

Puppy-eyes Jeremy.

Those were Jeremy’s eyes.

Swallowing, looking back down at his tea, Richard stammers, “Time and light, you say?”

And James immediately dissolves into the speech of realities and sub-divisions of dormant dimensions we have yet to touch and man’s inability to be involved into anything else but himself while at the same time struggling with the same, tumultuous mission. Richard barely listens, but it’s hardly his fault. The old fart has a talent for making boring noises emerge from the middle of his face and people actually find it amusing.

All equations summed, James is probably going to leave a deeper footprint in history than he and Jeremy combined, although that wouldn’t be fair to say about Jeremy. Jeremy, an atomic bomb of a man who is still being held as the greatest motoring presenter in history. History books will print his name and children will learn about him for tests. As of James, they will write assignments, preform presentations – hell, James is even now, still, making a great impact in the life of youngsters, what with a driving theory test app, what with his books, what with words of wisdom. James May, the Driving Guru, a saviour of Britain.

“Do you know when I first realized that?” James’ voice breaks through to Richard’s haze and he is suddenly back, aware that the philosophic rant is over and now there was a different edge to May’s voice. “That I was fucked?”

Richard looks up at him, surprised at the fact that James still managed to surprise him after forty years. “I remember the exact moment. It was when I couldn’t fit the cylinder crankcase into its holding about two years ago. When I had to rub my eyes twenty times, each more and more panicked, when my hands started to shake more of fear than bloody tremors. I just about took the screwdriver and stabbed myself with it when I remembered that Sarah would probably break her spine in half trying to clean up my mess.”

Richard fidgets. “James…”

The older man lifts his hand up, watches the tremors vibrate through his hand and fingers like he’s been using a jackhammer for three days without a break.

A head twitch. “The next blow: can’t drive anymore. All my cars; Ferraris, Porsches, Toyotas, useless. Shared them around to my nephews, nieces, their children, sold them to car shows.” He lowers his hand. “Can’t even remember last drive I had. I can’t remember how it felt like, I haven’t cemented it because I didn’t drive like it was the last time I’m ever going to drive in my life.”

“James, mate, it’s alright… You don’t have to talk about it.”

“What else is there to talk about?” James snaps sharply, a bit angrily, following head twitch surpassing all others. “We are the only thing we have left, Hammond, and you know that. There are some things Mindy and Sarah don’t know and never will. Things that only belong to us three”, he swallows and then, in a calmer voice, “I want this conversation to be one of them. I’m tired, Hammond, and I can’t sleep. I’m going blind and my bladder is shrinking and I’m fucking scared. I n…” he pauses, collecting himself. All this time he was careful not to rise his voice above certain point. “Jezza is gone. I need someone to hear me out… please.”

James never begs. He never did, not really. The meaning of it shoots an entirely different kind of chill down Richard’s back and arms, and he realizes.

He isn’t the only one who was trying to suppress just how much the loss of Jeremy had hit him. He was just too fucking blind to notice because James is James. James doesn’t show himself. He never says how he feels, other than how disappointed he is that he has to work with two cocks, each more annoying than the other.

More so, James is scared out of his mind. Not of death, of dying. He saw what it did to Jeremy. He saw how it gnawed at him, tortured him for years, kept him closed in a never-ending match of tug-of-war; who is going to yield first? Jeremy’s psyche or Jeremy’s body? Richard would often catch glimpses of James when he thought he was alone on the floor of the hospital, alone in the room with comatose Jeremy. Trying to be invisible around the corner of the askew door, Richard watched James crying silently, but inconsolably. Watching the same fate that awaited _him_.

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Hammond”, says James in present. “A man grows what he can, and he tends it.”

Richard wants to respond, but then in comes Sarah and the atmosphere suddenly lifts like a theatre curtain. She comes with a kettle and pours more tea into James’ mug, who doesn’t feel as apologetic and guilty about having to be fussed about as when it had first started.

“Do you need something else?” she asks gently.

“No thank you, darling”, James smiles up at her and she leans in without question so he could kiss her. In those blissful, succinct exchanges, James’ head never twitches.

Sarah, one brilliant ball of humour, says it’s because James’ nerves fear her.

Richard isn’t emotional. Out of three of them, maybe he’s the least emotional, even more passive than James. He simply doesn’t care enough to cry about things. Last time he cried was on Jeremy’s funeral, but only because he saw what was in that coffin. What death does with a human body is beyond descriptive. It is the most prominent defiler of everything humane. You can attempt to look youthful as much as you’d like. In the end, the ending is always the same. A grey, skin-hanging, hollow, light-ridden ending.

Richard realizes it was then that it truly hit him that Jeremy was gone. Not asleep. Not away, recovering because it’s Jeremy and he always comes back.

Gone.

“I’m just glad it’s over”, Emily was telling him at the reception. Her eyes are clear now. “I’m glad it’s done with, Uncle Richard.”

Richard was, too. Jeremy had strong kids. Strong, wonderful kids and even more wonderful grandchildren. It ignited pleasant little bubbles of something he couldn’t identify at the pit of his stomach, spreading warmly through his until now cold, rigid limbs.

“He’s proud of you, Em”, he tells her, guided by this strange feeling. “Whichever else path in life you might’ve taken, he’d still be proud of you. Trust me, I’ve known him long enough to know that without having to hear anything.”

The feeling only increases when Jeremy’s oldest gives him a grateful, warm smile of a woman who is radiating everything good and bad her father had taught her and she is beautiful.

Richard has the same bubbly sensation now, watching Sarah and James exchange a few quiet, private words before she departs with an understanding, warm look in Richard’s direction.

They sit in silence further on and Richard is idly circling his teaspoon in shallow circle at the bottom of the cup he cannot bring himself to finish because it would have to mean one of two things. He’s either going to have to ask for more, in which case, if she came for the second time, Sarah would stick around. Richard most certainly didn’t mind her company, but James’ last few sentences had made the air heavy and exigent with private tension that he doesn’t want her involved in.

The other option is to leave, which he isn’t prepared for because it would mean driving back to the mini-castle. Sinister, silent, empty, mini-castle until Mindy comes back. And he also doesn’t want that.

But what had he have left to say? What could he say to James now? The scariest part is that they are all so in tune they don’t even have to speak without already knowing what the other was going to say, but this is something else. An area where neither of them had ever been on, something they never discussed, and hadn’t had the mental strength for when it happened. Not for the first time, but still surprisingly, Richard is at the loss of words.

He sheepishly looks up.

James is asleep, his chest rising and falling consolingly steadily.

Richard politely finishes his tea, thanks Sarah and quietly leaves James’ house.

* * *

“Mr. Hammond, do you know what Charles Bonnet syndrome is?”

Here it goes. The final confirmation. Final proof that he’s gone completely crazy.

He doesn’t even notice when it happens for the first time. He and Mindy are idling in the living-room, close together, watching TV and sipping wine. They talk about whatever the hell two old people have to talk about. When Richard tips the glass back one time, he thinks he sees something small, tentacly and black churning around in the rosy drink. As the TV screen is half-transparently visible through the liquid he thinks it’s a shadow of a scene on the telly, but still reaches a safe conclusion that he is done with the wine for the night.

Later, he becomes sure it was one of the symptoms.

It occurs three more times in the span of two months and third time he almost has a heart attack when a tiger the size of a lorry with stripes on fire jumpscares the hell out of him on his way from the hairdresser and he hits the breaks so hard the car behind him screeches to a near-miss and his honk is in sync with the tiger’s mouth when it opens for a roar, but no noise ever comes. Richard briefly looks back, to apologize, to ask the driver with his eyes if he is seeing this shite as well, he doesn’t know, but when he turns around, the beast is gone and he is on the verge of hysterics for the rest of the drive.

He cannot hide his concern and jumpiness from Mindy for long. She is his best friend, after all. He bursts record-fast and tells her everything and she barely drags him to the doctor because he doesn’t want to end up in a room with white walls and arms strapped around his body and get crammed with pills on daily basis _and please I don’t want to leave you, Mindy!_

Richard reluctantly shakes his head a no.

“Well, your vision is deteriorating, isn’t it?” the doctor prompts, a polite, kind-looking woman. She looks at the file in her hands. “Says here your dioptre has decreased from -3 to -8,5 in just nine months. That is a huge leap.”

“Is he going blind?” Mindy asks for him, seeing as Richard’s throat is too clogged for speaking.

The doctor fixed her glasses. “No, not really... Well, it’s one of things that may lead to it. Mr. Hammond have you, by any chance, experienced those images in any other form than visual? Did you hear them make any sounds? Tried to touch them?”

Richard remembers a car horn synced with tiger’s open mouth. Again, mutely, he shakes his head.

The doctor smiles. “As I’m sure you know, weakening of sight is a normal thing in older age. When a person starts to lose their sight, the brain doesn’t receive as much information as it used to. In some cases, in order to fill the gaps, it begins to fill it with fantasy patterns or images, or, in layman’s terms, hallucinations. And since it is connected to vision, they are only visual. That is called Charles Bonnet syndrome.”

“So... I’m not crazy”, Richard finally speaks and his voice is shivery and the doctor can barely say ‘no, of course not’ and he is already jumping on his feet, cheering loudly, pulling a laughing Mindy up with him and kissing her with everything he has. He isn’t crazy. He isn’t going mad. He won’t have to leave Mindy, his children, James…

Since that day, more than two years since Jeremy’s death, Richard had turned this phenomenon into a game. If anything, it makes his life more colourful. He isn’t allowed to drive anymore, but his brain makes up for it by making him see all sorts of things. Waterfalls pouring from London Eye like a huge mill, cathedral towers protruding from the ground, even some cartoon characters, leaping down the streets like they actually exist. Once he’s even seen Top Gear Dog. His beautiful, beautiful girl. 

He doesn’t mind the orange ball of light that appears in his bedroom and whirls away into the bathroom, disappearing into the sink.

He doesn’t mind a group of Aztec-looking masked warriors charging down the pathway in front of his mini-castle in the middle of the day.

He doesn’t mind a black moth crouching on the wall above his bed.

He doesn’t mind the same black moth the size of a jet perched on top of a glass building in London, watching him with huge black, menacing orbs.

They all disappear as soon as he averts his eyes or squeezes them shut and rubs them.

All in all, it’s fun. Not half as bad as he had initially thought.

* * *

James surpasses Jeremy by four years, but the way he does is more dying than living. He can’t walk, can’t eat nothing but soup and even when he intakes that miserable amount, he vomits it right back out, he pees in a bag and shits in diapers, he’s connected to all sorts of needles and wires that filtrate his blood and he is almost blind. He never says it, he doesn’t because of Richard, but Richard knows that James cannot wait to be free of this prison of useless flesh and bones.

Richard is visiting him every day. Listens to the motoric beeping of the ECG and watches sickeningly thin form of his best friend, sits quietly when James attempts to talk, lungs turned to mush by the hungry, unforgiving malignant parasite, air being barely squeezed through in such small amounts that James had to rely on a machine to breathe for him.

“What do you see, Richard?” James’ voice whistles through his throat like old, castaway toy. His head is twitching less when it’s laid on a pillow.

That’s another thing. He’s been calling him Richard ever since his brain started to shut down, the black parasite spreading through his lymph nodes, gnawing at it like a sewer rat. It’s always been Hammond. Even when Richard had tumbled down a hillside in a burning supercar, believed to have been dead, it was _“Hammond’s in there!”_

Richard is sitting here, by the bed, in a tweed chair.

“I was on a fare with Mindy and grandchildren yesterday”, he says, remembering. “There was a huge mechanical elephant, walked right through the brass parade. I was never so sad that little Richie wasn’t able to see it.”

“Little Richie”, James repeats, slightly smiling. “How old is he now?”

“Twelve this October.”

A sharp exhale of breath comes out of James’ cannula-stuffed nose. “Not so little anymore.”

Richard smiles into empty air. “No, he isn’t.”

“Beep-beep, Richie”, James remembers the old 1990 series, starting to wheeze.

“Beep-beep, Richie”, Richard relates and they both laugh until James chokes and begins coughing, a horrific gurgling sound like his lungs are full of water making Richard’s skin crawl. He straightens up to reach for the plastic water cup with a half-sunk straw, but James waves him off in a way that said that cup was going to end up smacked to the other side of the room if it came any nearer, so Richard helplessly sits back down until James finally settles after several more wince-inducing coughs.

Some heavy heaves later, James speaks again: “Have you seen him?”

Richard bumps his walking cane against the floor, rubber bottom making soft, pleasant thumps and making the walking aid bounce a little each time. “No. I never see anyone I know.”

“Pitty”, says James, blinking against the twitches. “You could’ve told him how much of an asshole death is and how he should’ve told me.”

Richard gulps at that, not trusting his words.

There is a stretch of silence where ECG and the wall clock are commenced in a metronomic battle and one of them will keep ticking until its batteries are drunk dry while the other will get shut off for a short while until the moment it is needed to be beeping again.

And by all obvious, the syncope is blitzing close fast.

It was only a matter of days now.

“Thank you, James, if it means anything”, Richard says, collecting all sincerity he knows how to give, finally looking up at his friend. And it isn’t a blatant sentence. There is no place for berserk, false acts in this room. Not anymore. Acts aren’t important anymore. “Thank you.”

James looks at him; cataract-veiled pupils. Whites turned yellow. Irises still blazing proud stormy blue.

He opens his fingers towards Richard. Shaky, wrinkled, dry fingers. Richard leans forward, reaches out and takes them gently. Rubs a thumb over James’ knuckles. He feels the nerves under May’s skin tingle, savagely trying to cause havoc, run riot through every digit and every synapse. Break the man further than he is already broken.

Richard lifts a hand a kisses the knuckles, warm lips lingering against greyish skin which reminds him so bitterly much of that other time, other ashen skin, rid of any life at all, crumbling under the stoppage of time. James’ hand is cold. All of him is cold. And when the tingles are completely gone, he will never be warm again.

Richard presses another soft kiss on the same spot, trying to convey some of his warmth onto James, before briefly pressing the knuckles against his forehead and leaning back, looking up at James through thick-lensed glasses, eyes sad and tired.

“You soft pillock”, James rasps affectionately, small smile enormous given the man’s horrifyingly helpless weakness.

Richard only watches him in the eye, hoping to memorize every topographic feature of those brilliant irises.

* * *

He parts with James for the final time that Thursday. He, Sarah, Mindy, the kids, the family, the relatives and the entire London. Probably half an England.

Virtually, the entire world.

He gives a speech, the kind that people would expect, and thankfully no questions are allowed because one of them would then be ‘how does it feel to finally be alone?’ and Richard doesn’t know if he would be able to take it. He escorts James all the way and lingers there for a little, sees a small, white kitten, a puff of white fur, a miniature cloud, with eyes leaking psychedelic vortexes of colour, fleeting across the grass and disappearing among the gravestones.

He sits in his room for the rest of the day, waiting to see him. Even as it is only his brain playing tricks.

* * *

As time goes on without remorse, the consistency of the illusions intensifies. Not noticeably, more like a dog getting old. You don’t notice his fur has turned all mangy and sharp and his snout gone grey until you look at the pictures from when he was a pup. It treads mildly, carefully, stalking up Richard like a stealthy cougar.

And then suddenly, one day, completely unannounced, it pounces.

* * *

Six years after the initial diagnosis, he is eighty one and it’s a mildly wet day when, during one of his walks on his huge premises, he encounters him.

That man.

He immediately knows he has to be an illusion; he’s had years of learning how to distinguish them. But this time, Richard is confused.

Weak as his ears might have become, he thinks he can hear the man.

He is kneeling in the grass, digging into the dirt with a big rock with a pointed tip, bringing it up and striking the soil over and over again, all the while muttering things like, ‘get out, must get out’.

To Richard’s horror, once he comes close enough, he sees that the man is completely naked. His skin is tanned, filthy and covered in soot and dirt. Richard’s horror increases when he realizes the man’s toes are severed, he has distinct, fresh-looking burn marks all over his back and shoulders His hair is greasy, tangled in knots and flies are buzzing around his open wounds, sucking at his blood and flesh, something the man seems completely uncaring of.

Carefully, Richard approaches, treading cautiously with his cane in the grass.

“Hey… are you alright, mate?”

The man’s head turns sharply towards him and Richard yelps, stumbling backwards. The man’s right eye is completely gone under a bulb of flesh, burned so that it formed one solid surface with no dents and protrusions. Out of his other eye – frightful blue eye – wiggled a worm. The lips barely visible from the greasy bush of thick, grizzled beard are chapped and dry like paper, bitten through until all blood was gone from them.

While Richard is pushing down his vomit, the man rapidly, sharply shakes his head, muttering, “No… no, mustn’t stop… mustn’t think…” And goes back to what he was doing.

Richard’s heart is leaping out of his chest at this incomprehensible sight. He’s never seen anything like this before, even in the most grotesque of his hallucinations. What is more, he actually _heard_ the man. He could hear what he was saying, the mutterings, the soft thumping of rock against the deepening hole and the soft buzz of flies feasting on the stumps of his toes.

“Uhm…”, he weighted his options at what to say, certain that ‘do you need any help, should I call an ambulance’ is better than ‘this is private property, stop fucking up my grass and get the fuck lost’. So he says the former.

Again, he is sharply pinned with a one-eyed gaze which he really, really doesn’t want to hold.

But then, something changes in the man’s expression. Something that removes the dullness like a child removes a duvet from his head to see if the monster is gone. “You… I know you”, he points a shaky finger at Richard. Not the James-May shaky. A proper shake of a long-term pain-sufferer.

Richard’s throat goes dry. “W-what?”

“H-he spoke of you”, the man stammered. “Nine-Lives Man is what he calls you. He always jokes when he says that”, there is a brief pause after which the man’s one eye goes wider and the worm alarmingly wriggles. “You… you have seen him, haven’t you? You have seen the Moth.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate, but you’re going to have to leave.”

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Hammond”, the man grunts and Richard freezes.

“What… what did you say?”

The man’s eyes roll upwards and he looks around. Suddenly, his eyes go back to cold, raw fear and his chin quivers. “Oh, no… No, he found me. I don’t know how, but he found me… He _found_ me- -”

When the man begins whimpering and helplessly scrambling around, Richard nearly starts to scream and has half a mind to swing his cane and try to kick the man unconscious regardless of his old, aching bones.

And suddenly, everything becomes clear to Richard in one, swift swipe. Like his brain has been taken and turned inside-out like a washed-shirt. An uncovered moment from his past comes back to him, all of it, in a flash, and his knowledge is updated like an old system.

He drops his cane. It barely makes a sound as the grass catches it.

“The Moth”, he breathes. “The Moth is real.”

And it is not a question nor a sentence.

The entire sky goes dark and the burnt man starts to scream when something enormous launches down at them and Richard’s mind goes out without any explanation.

* * *

Jeremy opens his eyes. He senses a disturbance in the bee’s grand consciousness without having to ask. Nothing around here is having to be asked. All thoughts are out there, on the plate. Which is something he and James have a grand deal of fun messing around with.

He trots over, dense, curly hair being bounced and carried by the wind and his long jumps would put Armstrong to shame.

She is standing there by the lake, seemingly staring off. Jeremy pauses by her legs. Looks at the beautiful scenery and has to blink to chase away the incoming trance. “What is going on?”

_Something is happening_

the bee says.

Jeremy looks up, still feels like a little child every time he does. “Is it bad?”

_Your friend. There is an interference._

Jeremy feels something squeeze inside his chest and he grits his teeth and groans in pain against the feeling, clutching at his chest at this unfamiliar emotion. He whines and cannot quite escape the impression he is familiar with it. It makes him want to bite his nails off and rip all the hair out of his scalp. Makes him tense and want to escape the other way.

“W-what is this?” he gasps, shoulder pressing against one of the bee’s six legs, each thrice his size. “Make it stop!”

_You’ve known it before._

“I don’t want it”, he cries, face crumpling up and breathing turning heavy. “Take it back. P-please- -”

_I cannot take away your concern for your friend_

says the bee gently, ducking its head low so Jeremy can lean his forehead against a bundle of transparent, shimmering light. _My purpose isn’t to take._

“I want to come, too”, Jeremy pleads.

_Where I’m going, there is no place for you._

“Please. I want to help.”

Sweet, concerned, well-meaning Jeremy. Wide-eyed, pleading Jeremy. The candid depths of him the world was never meant to see.

_I know, little one. But the place I’m going is dangerous even for those who reign in place of eternal rest like you. It’s a fickle line of realm._

“Will Richard be okay? Will you be okay?”

_There is only one thing that the Moth fears._

And she straightens up, spreads her wings and the light goes supernova and Jeremy has to shield himself.

When everything is over, the world beyond begins to take shape again and the entity is no more.

He hears steps beside him and feels James’ presence. But he doesn’t look away from the distance where the sun sits, defying the concept of time and instead circling the sky like a billiard ball.

“He is on a stonier soil”, James says.

Jeremy looks at his friend then with pleading, fretful eyes. “James…”

James feels Jeremy’s need and follows it accordingly; he takes Jeremy’s hand in a firm, unrelenting grip; a tight-fingered, half-handshake grip and Jeremy returns in equal measure, eager to have some of James’ calmness the other ever so liberally wielded with.

There is a storm brewing in the far distance. Lightning flashes and dense black clouds that don’t belong in this level of soul-drifting consciousness send gusts of bitter, foul wind their way.

Jeremy tightens his grip on James in tandem with something tightening its grip on his heart.

* * *

Even before he opens his eyes, Richard knows he’s in hell.

Slowly fading in is the screaming in a quantity unlike anything Richard has ever heard before. It’s a single, cacophonic choir, here and there made worse by a piercing solo shriek that is a bit higher and louder than the others. He is also hot, suffocating in humid fumes of heat and horrible stench he is too petrified to name.

He opens his eyes not because he wants to, but out of fear of keeping them closed.

He is laying on an elevated ground and in front of him is a stretch of charred canyons, empty wastelands and pits of fire all the way to horizon. Holes, piled with screaming, crying souls and more of them incoming from all directions in irregular, miserable queues akin to slithering snakes Everything is vast and endless, and yet seems enclosed as if confined into an inside of a huge, breathing, living thing.

Richard is repeatedly hit by consistent gusts of smells of burning flesh, pouring blood and human excrements. If there was any doubt until now that all this had nothing to do with his eyesight condition, then it was well pierced through now. What is more, the veil of dealing with poor eyesight for the past several years of his life has been lifted from his optic tools, allowing him to see clearer than ever, and he would give anything if he could have that veil back now.

“Play the hand you’re dealt.”

Richard turns around sharply and nearly faints.

There is Jeremy, not a few meters away. Old, wrinkled, grey skin hanging from his body like wet laundry, eyes sunken in and dead-looking, lips thinned-out and dehydrated, hair almost completely gone. The sight somehow worse than what Richard had seen in that coffin.

Jeremy seems to read his mind and grins, showing brown, rotten teeth and gaps where some are missing. “That’s the rule. To play a hand you’re dealt. You’d think it’s so simple, but they obviously didn’t think so.”

“Leave him be, Jeremy”, another voice, from the other side and Richard nearly jumps out of his skin. There is James, looking equally dead, sick and spat out of the ground. His skinny, hunched, half-bald form doesn’t agree with Richard’s fond memories of the man. “He doesn’t need to know all that. As if he ever could.”

 _That’s not them. That’s not them and you_ know _it. That’s not them. Get it out of your head._

“Is this hell?” Richard asks anyway.

“No. It’s worse”, says Jeremy, standing by Richard; a puke-inducing odour of putrefaction is emitting from him. “It’s the Ark. A place of eternal karma. Whatever ill you did in life, it is brought back to bite you in the arse threefold. Rapists.”

Jeremy motions towards a pit full of hanging cages and men of all races and ages stuffed in them, forced by tight, confined space into a highly uncomfortable kneeling position where their arched backs are pressing against the ceiling. They are missing their genitalia and, the sight that makes Richard sick, are mercilessly, savagely sodomized by demons.

“Cannibals”, James shows the other way.

Feeling the need to look elsewhere, Richard tears away his gaze with an internal sigh of relief, but isn’t rewarded comfort. Instead, he sees a rail with no fence and a giant mine wagon piled over the brim with naked humans. It slowly tips over and the screaming people are falling into the huge, grinning, open maw of a morbidly obese man with hollows for eyes.

“Murderers”, hisses Jeremy.

People being thrown into the pit full of carnivorous pigs that tear them apart and devour the pieces. Richard is close to screaming when he realizes that the flesh and bones that get ripped apart, get reattached back together, making the already pained screams of the damned even more painful.

“And many others”, says James, too cheerfully.

“H-how long do they have to…” _suffer_ was the word Richard is too weak to say.

“Until the Ark is satisfied”, hisses Jeremy, grinning. “And sometimes it likes to take a long, _long_ time.”

There is something in a way that Jeremy stretches the word that makes Richard lose it. He turns around and runs, shoes scraping across soot and dry ground.

He doesn’t make it very far. Out of darkness, from behind one boulder jumps a white, slimy, worm-like thing with a pair of front limbs and two tiny eyes sown narrowly on top of its head, a thin line stretching across the middle of it like long mouth. Richard yelps and jumps back, but then the line parts like a zipper, revealing another face underneath; a bloody, skinless face with bulging eyes and wide, cavernous mouth, gaping towards Richard and with an adrenaline-boosting scream, he jumps out of its way and runs the other way.

He hears a screech of frustration; a sound like an old, wrongly-muffled trumpet and it follows him as the creature gives chase.

With heart pumping in his ears, Richard is too petrified to properly mind his surroundings and he miscalculates the width of a passage between two pits and his shoe slips. With another scream, he attempts to grip an old wooden platform chucked into the edge, but the weak wood breaks in his hand and he plummets. In a second, his renewed reflexes grip an old rope that’s been attached to a rusty pulley at the top, jerking his body to an abrupt stop and preventing inertia from pulling him any deeper.

Richard is hyperventilating, smoke, dust and dry air scraping his throat and his tears are vaporizing at an impressive pace. Something peers over the edge and he looks up at a pair of distorted faces, uncontrolled gasps of hysteria exploding out of him.

Jeremy grins and, keeping an eye-contact, deliberately reaches down, gripping the rope.

“No!” squeaks Richard, bucketing a little, no dignity in his voice at all. “No, please.”

“How does it feel?” sneers Jeremy. “To have the fate of your soul in someone’s hands?”

“Hee, hee”, giggles James.

“You think the control over things you thought you had in your life was ever real at all?” Jeremy continues, almost triumphantly. “Look down.”

Against his will, knowing that he shouldn’t, Richard does.

The hole of a gigantic radius he is hanging above is filled with swarms of millions and millions of cockroach-like insects. They make a black, shimmering mass, scurrying all over each other – and people drowning in that dispiteous well. Richard notices bulges under the pool of blackness, human bodies attempting to break free.

A face of a man emerges near the wall just below Richard. His skin is moist, smooth and eaten through many millions of tiny bites. He watches as the man tips his head back, can barely attempt a yelp of agony before four or five insects find their way into his open mouth. Richard listens to awful sounds as the man chokes and attempts to claw at his face and neck in futile attempts to scrub the scurrying animals off him, but they already covered him completely and united him with the rest of the living lake.

Richard makes a noise he’s never heard himself make before, never knew he could; a sound between a whimper, a cry and a shriek. He isn’t even sure if it’s him who made it.

“There is only one who has control, Richard”, Jeremy tells him, voice risen above Richard’s screams. “On all levels.”

The pulley gives in under the weight a little and the movement jerks him down. Richard yells, swinging his legs about. Moans of torture below seemed to intensify in his ears.

“Which pit do you think you belong to, Richard?” Jeremy asks him. “Are you a fraud? A greedy bastard? A molesting megalomaniac? Have you been treating people like shite? How many dark secrets have you left behind locked in your basement?”

Richard’s fingers start bleeding from friction of the rope and the tight, desperate grip he holds it with.

“Do it. Do it. Let him drop”, James pants.

“Oh, you would like that, wouldn’t you?” Jeremy purrs, leaning in and, to Richard’s horror, licks James’ salty cheek lasciviously. “You would like to see him squirm and squeal as they begin to feast on him, wouldn’t you?”

The shaking of May’s head is lost in his whole body vibrating in excitement. “Yes! Yes. I want to see him mauled.” Saliva drips from his mouth as he whines like a child wanting a toy in the shop window.

The pulley cracks again. Richard sinks another foot.

“ _I-I don’t belong here_!” he explodes, tears evaporating as soon as they are out of his eyes. “ _I don’t!_ Fucking pull me up, please! I don’t… I- _agh!_ \- - please. Please, pull me up! Fuck- I—I don’t. This isn’t my place to be.”

A suspicious silence from up there and Richard is only forced to listen to tiny squeaks of the cockroaches and muffled cries for help from souls writing beneath them. Richard profusely blinks back tears. Jeremy looks pensive. He has a small pout on his lips, but the hand is still gripping the rope.

“He’s right, though”, says James, suddenly serious. “The Big Shot won’t be happy if we let him fall down. What is he good for, then?”

Jeremy still thinks for a few moments, and then pulls hard. Richard is flying through the air and is suddenly on solid ground again, but before he can think of doing anything, Jeremy is already there.

“No, you don’t belong here”, he agrees, leaning in until his lips are against Richard’s ear. The stench of death is driving Richard livid. “You are meant for something else. So you will kindly follow us to the surface.”

Then two heavy hands are on each of Richard’s shoulders and he is catapulted up like in the rocket until his head smashes through something hard and he is flying through the air again, eventually smashing against hard, metal surface.

He groans in throbbing pain all over his body and attempts to push himself up, but is dazed and his ears are ringing. There is breathable air here that doesn’t bite at all his senses, though, and soft wind is caressing his hair almost comfortingly. He feels two presences behind him, but is too hazy to notice. 

“The Nine-Lives Man”, giggles James.

“The Nine-Lives Man”, agrees Jeremy with a sneer.

They back away, ducking their heads, looking up behind Richard.

Still hazy, Richard looks.

At a colossal, mammoth figure of an open-winged black moth. From Richard’s perspective, it is a single, solid black wall of blackness, stood upright and motionless, a menacing sculpture carved in anguish.

 _Rimac_ comes back to him and his left knee begins screaming in pain and Richard groans, first in pain, then frustration, then defiance. Pushing aside his fear, he suddenly remembers who he is and dauntlessly pushes onto his feet.

He is looking up to where the moth’s head is and a brief trade of thoughts occurs.

Then Richard snarls, “ _No_.”

And turns around to run for it.

Two giant leg-wriggling insects are barricading his way and he relents into another round of screaming, all the bravery and self-control sucked out of him. He falls on his rear, attempts to crawl away on his hands whimpering and pleading like a little child, feeling utterly helpless, alone and afraid.

 _Get it over with_ , he begs the moth. _Please. End this._

**No. You have a hand you're dealt to play. Show me your soil.**

Richard gasps when a brute force begins tearing at something inside him. Not physical, yet it feels so; it tears into him, is tearing something away from it. Something he needs. His memories are disarrayed, his thoughts melting, his soul being stretched. Fear and despair are slowly being replaced by indifference. The shell. That is what is going to be left of him. A walking bag of bones, muscles and organs. And it’s completely alright. He was never of much use to anyone. But who exactly were everyone? Who was he? He is slowly losing consciousness and he lets it be lost.

Then suddenly, a burst of white light.

Richard is physically and mentally jerked. Memories, emotions, soul return to whole.

There is deep, screeching noise that might’ve been the black monstrosity.

Richard doesn’t know. Because he starts to fall.

And he’s falling.

Falling.

Until he is dispersed out of existential plane.

* * *

Richard spits out water and it gushes out of his mouth, making him cough. He pulls himself up with his hands on the grassy ground, out, out, hips, legs and finally, feet, blinking away droplets in one second only to be completely dry in the next.

He blinks in the beaming sunlight, a contrast to the dark, fiery hell he had previously been exposed to, gorgeous green grass, shimmering blue lake and proud distant mountains. He is so mesmerized by the sudden beauty of the scenery that he almost gets startled when he spots a figure directly in front of him. At first he jumps at the sight of a tall, black silhouette, brought back to the looming insectile monstrosity, but then he spots a few faults in his initial assertion.

Then the world is clearer, his eyes adjust to the light, and Richard sees him.

Jeremy. Real Jeremy is looking at him from up there, clear as day. Jeremy, who grins, and all his teeth are accounted for, white, arranged, right. There is a huge, suspiciously rich amount of hair on top of his head, all curly and dark and he looks fresh, youthful and inexplicably gorgeous. “Lost your way, Hamster?” he says, voice ringing in such a healthy, perfect way, brushing lovingly against his ears. “I thought that was Slow’s specialty.”

“Eighty-one, Hammond? I thought it was always meant that you beat us both. Quite honestly, I’m disappointed.”

James, here, next to Jeremy. Equally gorgeous, with flowy brown hair caressing his youthful face and beautiful, mesmerizing feline blue eyes. Richard’s breath is taken away from him for an entirely different reason now as he takes everything he can to comprehend James’ beauty.

An L finds its way on Jeremy’s forehead.

And then all of it is too much.

He breaks.

He just starts crying profusely still on his knees, unable to bear this sadness, the relief, the trauma, the seething cauldron of emotions that is brimming in his heart. He wails, brought back to his child-self, helpless and surrendered to whatever life is going to throw at him, be it good or bad. He clutches at his chest, trying desperately to not have his heart shatter into million pieces as the emotions mixed and mixed and just couldn’t lay out.

Then he feels contact on both sides of him, two pairs of arms encircling him protectively and then Jeremy is peppering insistent kisses into his hair and James is murmuring comforting words in his ear, both rocking him, sharing his anguish, his confusion, his realisation. Richard is grabbing at them both for leverage, unable to stop, unable to speak or think because nothing will ever exist that could convey how he feels and what he has been keeping buried inside him for his entire life as it inflated and grew over the years and now finally being released in a torrent of more than just tears.

“I love you”, he cries, clutching at James and Jeremy. “I love you. James, I love you. Jeremy…”

Jeremy finally stops the assault of kisses and nuzzles his face into Richard’s soft, wavy hair, smiling happily. Truly, unabashedly happy. They are all together now. The triangle is complete.

James takes Richard’s hand into his own; smooth, warm, _still_ hand, and plants a gentle kiss to the knuckles. Richard’s own hand doesn’t bleed anymore, or bears any signs that it ever had.

James leans his forehead against Richard’s, eyes closed, trying to share his calmness and take some of Richard’s toll and when Richard ducks his head to bury his face in James’ neck, he lets him, nudging his temple with his nose, aware of Jeremy’s affection-radiating vicinity.

“You’re home”, James murmurs.

And yes, he was.

Yes, he was.

* * *

They drive, they do. Cars engineered by their imagination, each fitting their own concept of perfection, circling, drifting in a valley of stars, wheels sliding through the thinnest layer of water that makes the flat ground a mirror image of the star sky above.

Finally together again.


End file.
